


Tellurium

by zorac



Series: Chemistry [11]
Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game), Life Is Strange: Before The Storm (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Afterlife
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-22
Updated: 2020-02-22
Packaged: 2021-02-28 07:06:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,336
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22846078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zorac/pseuds/zorac
Summary: When Chloe finally succumbed to the after-effects of her crash, she didn’t expect to wake up — that was more Kate’s thing, after all. But, it turns out that dying is kinda like getting a fresh start, and the opportunity to make new friends, do new things, and live your best afterlife.Follows on fromLead.
Relationships: Rachel Amber & Chloe Price
Series: Chemistry [11]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/820581
Comments: 8
Kudos: 14





	Tellurium

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What, did you really think that you’d seen the last of Chloe in this series?

###### Chloe

I’m woken up by a loud _Meow!_ directly in my ear. Which is really weird, because I’m pretty sure that cats aren’t allowed in hospitals. Also, because I was definitely not expecting to wake up again. I open my eyes, and see a night sky; or, more precisely, a pre-dawn sky. A small, wet nose butts into my cheek, followed by a second _meow_. I turn my head to see a furry white and grey face. It takes me a moment to realize that I recognize the cat.

“Hey, Bongo,” I say to him. He chirps at me, apparently satisfied by my acknowledgement, then takes a few steps and flops down next to me.

The sun bursts over the horizon, impossibly swift, and the light allows me to take in my surroundings. I’m lying on a vast expanse of green grass, leading down to a blindingly white sand beach. Floating on the deep blue ocean beyond that, is a single grey ship.

“No. Fucking. Way,” I whisper.

“Yes fucking way,” comes a voice from my other side.

I turn my head around, and see a vaguely familiar young woman sitting cross-legged on the grass a few feet away. Behind her, the ground slopes up into rolling hills and, behind those, distant snow-capped mountains.

“Rachel?” I ask when I manage to place her; the blue feather earring is what gave it away.

“The one and only! Well, kinda. How’s it hangin’, Chloe?”

“Uh… I thought you were…”

“Murdered?”

“Well, yes.”

“I was; but since you’re dead too, is it really that much of a surprise to see me here?”

“I guess not, but… we hardly knew each other.”

Rachel gets a pensive look. “Right; about that. Technically _we’ve_ never met before. The girl you occasionally studied with was a different version of me.”

“Um, what?”

“Your friend Max kinda broke time.” Before I can figure out what the hell to say to _that_ , she adds, “look, do you want to sit up or something. It’s getting really weird watching you just lie there.”

“Shit, Rachel, if we _had_ met, you’d know that I’m paralyzed from the neck down.”

“If you’re paralyzed, how are you petting your cat?” I crane my neck, and see that Bongo has pushed his head under my hand. And… that I seem to be absent-mindedly stroking him. I realize that I can feel his soft fur against my fingers, the ground against my back, and a gentle breeze blowing over me.

“What the actual fuck?” I yank my hand away from the cat like I’ve been burned, and practically slap myself in the face. Attempting to sit up results in an uncoordinated flop onto my side. I glare at Rachel with her barely contained laughter, and somehow manage to lever myself into a sitting position. “Sorry, kitty cat,” I tell Bongo, and reach out a hand to where he sits, watching me warily. After a moment, he stretches forward to sniff my fingers, then comes closer so that I can stoke him properly.

“See,” Rachel says, “being dead isn’t all bad. You can move again, and you got your cat back.”

“Yeah,” I say as I carefully pick Bongo up and cuddle him, “but I lost my girlfriends, and my best friend, and my parents…” The cat wriggles out of my grasp, makes an unimpressed grumbling noise, and turns away. He saunters through some sort of hole that briefly opens up in the air in front of him, then vanishes. “What the fuck?” I repeat, lurching backwards, and succeeding only at falling over again.

“Portals; it’s how we get around here. Cats can open them too; nobody’s sure why, when dogs and other animals don’t seem to be able to. The main theory is that they’re like any other cats: they do wherever the fuck they want to.”

I can’t help but laugh at that. “So… where exactly _is_ here? And why does it look like something straight out of Tolkien?”

Rachel shrugs. “The afterlife. Doesn’t seem to be either heaven or hell – unless you subscribe to the whole ‘hell is other people’ thing, because there’s certainly plenty of _them_ around. This particular place is… I suppose you could call it an arrivals lounge. There are loads of different ones; I guess this had some kind of meaning to you.”

I think back to what Max was singing to me as I drifted away. “Yes, It does. It really does.” Blinking away the tears that are threatening, I get myself back into a sitting position. “So there are others?”

“Yeah, you can wake up floating on a cloud, or lying on a beach in Tahiti, or… there was this weird one I saw with thousands of people naked on the bank of a river with these giant stone mushrooms. Oh, and there’s one that’s like some doctor’s waiting room, but with the words ‘Welcome! Everything is fine.’ printed on the wall – nobody seems to know what that’s about, but apparently it’s going to be really popular a few years from now.”

“So, explain to me about how Max broke time.”

“Okay, for starters, it wasn’t actually _your_ Max, it was the one from my timeline, which has… some differences from yours. Not long after she came back to Arcadia Bay, Max got the ability to rewind time; nothing major, just a few minutes, but it started to have some weird side-effects. Things really went to hell after she found a way to jump back several _years_. You actually met her, it was the morning she told you she was leaving for Seattle, just before William went to pick up Joyce from the store.”

“I remember, he couldn’t find his car keys; somehow they’d ended up in the sink.”

“Yeah, that’s because time-traveling Max dumped them there.”

“Why?” I ask, puzzled.

“Because in our timeline, William _did_ drive to the store; except on the way his car got T-boned by an eighteen-wheeler. Max was trying to bring her best friend’s Dad back from the dead.”

“My dad… died?” I’m not sure how I feel about that, how I would have felt, how the other me must have felt.

“I’m afraid so. But… that also meant that he wasn’t there to give you a car for your sweet sixteen present.”

My mind reels at this second shock. “So… your Chloe was never in the accident.” Rachel shakes her head. Fuck. I really need Kate right now; she’d know what to say, how to help me process this. “She was… is still happy and healthy?”

“Healthy? Yeah; physically, at any rate. But happy?” She shakes her head again. “What with her Dad dying, and Max leaving, and – by the time I met her a couple of years later – her Mom having a shitty new boyfriend, she was pretty messed up.”

“You were friends, then?” I’d already assumed that, unless Rachel has a thing for showing up to welcome random strangers.

“Best of,” she confirms. “It started when we both went to see Firewalk at the old mill…”

“You went to see people fire walking?” Sounds… kinda weird.

“No, they’re a band.”

“Oh. Never heard of them.”

“Huh. I guess you must have different taste in music from _my_ Chloe. You’ve certainly got a different dress sense.”

I look down. I’m wearing a cardigan over a pale blouse, slacks, and sensible flats. “What’s wrong with how I dress?”

“Nothing,” Rachel says, not entirely convincingly, “but I remember Chloe looking more like this.” She flicks her wrist, and suddenly I’m wearing ripped jeans, combat boots, and a sleeveless T-shirt with a skull on the front and half the sides missing. Three bullets hang from a cord around my neck, and one of my arms is covered in a huge tattoo. When Rachel holds up a small mirror, I can see that my hair is blue.

“What did you do to me?” She doesn’t respond straight away. “Rachel?”

“Right. Sorry.” Another flick of her wrist, and my clothes go back to normal. “It’s just… that was exactly how Chloe looked the last time I saw her, before…”

“The Dark Room?”

“Yup. It sucks that no matter what else Max changed, I still ended up in a shallow grave at American Rust.”

“Did they catch Nathan and Jefferson? In your… timeline?”

“Yeah, Chloe and Max figured it out, just like Kate and her Scooby Gang did.”

“And… does that mean there are two of you here?”

“Oh, yeah; it’s hella creepy. Also, it _really_ pissed off the Powers That Be. The little rewinds all sort-of fixed themselves, but when Max did that big jump, she created another version of Arcadia Bay – the one you’re from. After that, They sent someone down to ‘deal with the situation.’ Got rid of Max’s time powers and cleaned up all the weird side effects. Your timeline got left running as some sort of parallel thing with only the people who are majorly different from their original versions.”

“Does that mean… there’s some version of my Dad here?”

Rachel nods. “He would have been here to meet you, but he thought that would be too confusing, or distressing, or… between you and me, I think he’s just nervous. Either way, we agreed that being met by someone you _knew_ was dead would probably be safer. You can meet him whenever you’re ready.”

“I think I might need a little more time to adjust first. And… could you help me to stand? I don’t know if I can manage it by myself.”

“Sure!” Rachel gets up, and stands in front of me, reaching down. I take her hands, and let her pull me upright. My legs feel wobbly and, after a moment, they start to give way. Rachel catches me, leading us into a full-body hug. Which, honestly, feels really good; I haven’t had one in almost four years. It takes me a little while to realize that Rachel’s clinging to me even more tightly than I am to her.

“You okay?” I ask.

Rachel reaches up to wipe away a tear. “I’m fine. It’s just been a while since I got to hold you… _her_ like that.”

“I never got to hold either of my girlfriends at all,” I mutter.

“Wait… _girlfriends?_ Shit, I’m sorry, Chloe. That was super-thoughtless of me.”

I concentrate on trying to stay upright. My legs seem to be finding their strength pretty quickly. Also, I’m somewhat relieved to find that Rachel hasn’t been spying on _every_ aspect of my life. “Um. Yeah. Max and Victoria and me. We got together a few weeks after they first came to visit me.”

“Wow. How did that… I mean, could you even…” She shakes her head. “Sorry. _So_ not my business.”

“That’s okay, Rachel.” And, it _is_ ; even though I barely know either version of her, somehow I already feel some sort of a connection, like an echo of the one she had with _her_ Chloe. “Obviously, my participation in our sex life was limited, and we only ever got a handful of opportunities, but it meant the world to me that they wanted to.” I can feel my cheeks going pink, so I cast around for a change of subject. “So, you and Chloe?”

“Not really, I mean, kinda, but…”

“Well, fuck, you really cleared that up, Rachel.”

She sighs. “Chloe was in love with me. She fell hard and fast, and I knew it. I loved her too, but it wasn’t quite the same. I was dealing with some serious shit at the time – I mean, we both were, but mine was fresh, and hers had been going on for a few years by then – and I really needed her support. I guess you could say that I friend-zoned her, and then to make things worse I started chasing after guys. I really hurt her, but she stuck with me because she’s awesome. We talked about running away together, getting the fuck out of Arcadia Bay, but we never quite managed to make it happen. I think if we had, then things would have been different, that I could have let myself be what she wanted me to be. That I would have wanted it too.”

Rachel gives me a resigned shrug. “I guess we’ll never know, now. I’m dead, and she’s moved on. At least Max seems to make her happy, from what I’ve managed to see of them.”

“Well, I may not be _your_ Chloe, but I think I could probably use a friend right about now.”

“I’d like that,” Rachel admits, “every other friend I had isn’t dead.”

“Cool. Well, I guess I should probably go say hello to Dad. Don’t want to keep him waiting.”

“Sure thing.” Rachel makes a circular motion with her hand, and a portal opens in the air in front of us. She pulls me through into what’s clearly a teenager’s bedroom. More specifically, I realize as I take in the shape of the room and its furniture, _my_ old bedroom. The décor, however, is radically different. “This is how my Chloe’s room looked,” Rachel explains. “I’ve got no idea what your version was like. While we can spy on what’s going on back on Earth, it really is like looking down from the sky; we can only see and hear what’s happening outside; there’s even something that blocks us from seeing through windows.”

“This… hasn’t been my bedroom since I turned sixteen. After the accident, stairs were no longer an option for me, so Mom and Dad converted the room behind the garage. I know they did their best, but it still felt as much like a hospital ward as a bedroom.” I take everything in; like when Rachel showed me how her Chloe looks, it all seems completely alien to me. I can’t really imagine being the person who looked like that, or had a room that looks like this.

“I… I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault. It’s all on the asshole drunk driver who got out of jail before I got out of hospital. He certainly never bothered to apologize.”

Rachel doesn’t seem sure how to respond to that. “Um. Anyway, William said he’ll be waiting downstairs whenever you’re ready.”

“Right, well, there’s not time like the present, I guess.” I make my way over to the door, take a deep breath – a novel sensation after all these years – and open it. The landing outside looks much more familiar than my old room. Slowly, I make my way down the stairs, and realize that I can smell something baking. I glance into the kitchen, which seems almost exactly as I remember it, then walk through to the back room. Bongo is curled up on the couch, and sat at the dining table is a man who looks almost exactly like my Dad. A five-years younger version of my Dad, without all the worry lines he got after my accident.

When he sees me, he stumbles to his feet. “Hey, kiddo,” he says, somewhat awkwardly. For a moment, I’m not sure how to react; then, going with my first instinct, I throw myself into his arms and burst into tears. He holds me close, gently strokes my hair, and whispers something reassuring in my ear. I feel like I’m fourteen again, and it’s wonderful. I decide, right here and now, that I don’t care if he’s not exactly the same person who helped look after me these past few years; almost three quarters of my life happened before the timelines diverged, and he was there for all of that.

“Hey, Dad. It’s really great to be able to hug you again.”

“I’ve missed you so much,” he says, and I can tell from his voice that he’s crying too. “And I know you’re not _my_ Chloe, but…”

“That doesn’t matter,” I tell him. “You didn’t really get any time with either of us after Max changed things.”

“I suppose so, but I’ve been watching over her ever since I died, and I’ve only been able to look in on you for a few months.”

“Well, from the sound of things, that doesn’t give you anything like the full story, so I’m not sure it matters.” I loosen my hold on Dad, and when he does the same, I step back and wipe my cheeks.

“Thanks for meeting Chloe,” Dad says to Rachel, who I’d almost forgotten was still there.

“Hey, no problem, Mister Price,” she replies. “Look, I’m going to leave you two alone to get re-acquainted.” She tosses me something which looks like it might be next year’s – or next decade’s – iPhone. “Call me if you want to talk, or hang out, or… whatever.”

Impulsively, I give her a quick hug. “Will do,” I promise. She smiles, steps backwards through the portal that wasn’t there a split-second before, and vanishes.

“So, did you know Rachel well?”

“Nah,” I tell Dad. “I mean, we had some of the same classes at Blackwell, back before the accident, and we studied together a couple of times, but we were never friends or anything. After Max left, I went full-on science geek, and Rachel – the one from my world, at least – was definitely more of an arts nerd. Plus she was cool, and popular, and I was neither.”

“Well, my Chloe turned out to be a little bit _too_ ‘cool,’ and it got her into trouble. Her and Rachel, both; I wouldn’t go so far as to say they were bad influences on each other, but from what I saw, they seemed to enable each others’ worst tendencies. Just something to bear in mind.”

“I wasn’t planning to run off and become her new bestie, don’t worry, but I’m guessing there aren’t that many people around my age, at least not that I have some kind of connection to.”

“No, I suppose not.”

“Look, is it okay if I stay here tonight? I’m not really sure where else I would go. Does this place even have night? Do I actually need to sleep? Where is ‘here’?”

Dad laughs a little. “You’re welcome to stay here as long as you like; this is still your home, if you want it to be. ‘Here’ is… well, I guess you could call it a nostalgic version of Arcadia Bay, and yes, it does have night. And yes, you will need to sleep – while you’ll find that you won’t get physically tired like you did in the real world, it seems our minds still need to rest.” The sound of an egg-timer comes from the kitchen, and Dad hurries in there to pull a sheet of cookies out of the oven. My mouth waters.

“Those smell _fantastic_. When did you learn to bake?”

He shrugs. “I’ve had plenty of time to learn all sorts of things. Of course, I could have just magicked these up, but it’s so much more satisfying to make them from scratch.” I reach to take one of the cookies, but Dad slaps my hand away. “You’ll burn your mouth,” he warns me.

“Can I even do that here?”

“Well… it’s not going to do you any permanent harm, but it still hurts.”

“But I want my sugar fix _now_!” I whine, in the most annoying voice I can muster.

He laughs, and I just know that this is going to be good – for both of us. We end up talking long into the night, and eventually he opens up about how hard it’s been for him watching his wife move on with her life without him. That leads to me telling him about Max and Victoria, and the realization that it’ll likely be decades before I see them again – and that they’ll be such completely different people by then that… I don’t know. Of course, I’ve no idea what I’ll be like after a few decades in the afterlife. Dad doesn’t really have much advice to offer, but he’s still a comforting presence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don’t have much plotted out for where this story is going, but I do plan to update it, alongside further stories back in the not-afterlife. Probably the first chapter of what I’m tentatively titling _Argentum_ will be the next thing in this series, but I have a warren of other plot bunnies clamouring for my attention, so I’m not going to make any guesses about when…


End file.
